


(the folly of) youth

by tigriswolf



Series: favorites [117]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Merlin (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Time Shenanigans, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-19 15:50:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8215420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigriswolf/pseuds/tigriswolf
Summary: There are fixed points in time, around which all else turns.  The death of King Arthur is one of them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title: (the folly of) youth  
> Fandom: Merlin (BBC)/Doctor Who  
> Disclaimer: Merlin, Arthur, and 10 aren’t mine  
> Warnings: post-series for Merlin; at some point after Donna for Doctor Who  
> Pairings: none  
> Rating: PG  
> Wordcount: 2230  
> Point of view: third 
> 
> Note: I lean toward the Doctor being Ten, but that's up to you. 
> 
> Another note: this ended up so much sadder than I thought it would.

The strangers ride into town at midday, dressed oddly. Children run alongside them, chattering up at the younger of the two. That first day, Merlin barely notices them. He has chores at the tavern, where he works for room and board, and he has tonics to make for the local midwife, and he has three druids trying to convince him to join them at their camp. He’s managed to keep out of trouble for the entire century since Camelot fell, waiting for Arthur to return.

There is a beast of some sort prowling around, feasting on travelers. It can’t enter the town because of Merlin’s protection spell, and he’s planned to seek it out after he finished at the tavern, that day the strangers ride into town.

Of course, that evening, the beast cannot be found. Merlin finally returns to his workroom to complete the tonics, which he delivers to Mary before going to sleep.

He’s up with the dawn, to do it all again.

.

For a week, there’s a whisper just beyond his reach. He asks the druid elder if it’s them and she assures him it’s not. He hunts the beast, sleeps, works at the tavern, helps the midwife when she requests. On the fifth morning, he wakes up and says, “Oh.” He knows the taste of the magic on the air.

He asks Ann, the tavern-keeper’s wife, “What do you know about those two strangers?” Ann’s brother runs the inn, so she knows quite a bit.

.

“Hello, Emrys,” the older stranger says quietly as Merlin slips into the room.

Merlin looks closely, past the beard and gray hair, past the sloped shoulders. Magic shimmers on the air. Merlin hasn’t aged since Arthur died but a glamour falls and two identical men stare at each other in a small room in a small town as far from Camelot as Merlin could get without drowning in guilt.

“I’ve spent nearly two thousand years wondering how to say what I remember being told,” the other Merlin says, sinking onto the bed. “I’ve spent decades locked in anger, in grief, in despair and hope, and a few terrible years where I was completely numb.”

“Two thousand years?” Merlin echoes, unable to even contemplate so long a time. “Has Arthur returned?”

The older Merlin shakes his head. 

“Will we live until he does?” Merlin demands. “What’s the point without him?”

“Have you counted the stars?” the older Merlin asks. “Have you ever wondered if other worlds exist, where other people live?”

“You know I have, if you’re me,” Merlin says, trying to breathe out the anger. He’s been so angry lately.

The older Merlin smiles. “For me, Arthur is a dream, Emrys. I’ve lived entire lives without him, on worlds you can barely imagine. I’ve met beings more powerful than us, felt different magicks. But always, I come back to this Earth. To this island. To where we were born, I and the only king who ever held my loyalty.”

Merlin blinks, gapes, tries to find words. How can this be a speech he’ll give one day? How can he possibly live for thousands of years, to become this man?

“The stars sing,” the older Merlin says. “I think that at some point, when needed, Arthur’s soul will return, hopefully to this planet. But you cannot exist purely to wait for him.”

“My destiny,” Merlin begins, the idea he’s clung to since he first went to Camelot.

“Your destiny.” The older Merlin interrupts him to scoff. “You feel the turn of the Earth. You hear the heartbeat of magic. You have neither equal nor superior on this world, and your power will grow with every year. You cannot imagine,” he says firmly, eyes flaring gold, “as I could not, Emrys, what you will be.”

Merlin shudders as the air thickens. “You feel this planet,” the older him continues. “I feel our sun and every world circling it. I could reach out to touch that star, pull some of it into me, and I could burn this planet to dust.”

Merlin gasps as this man he cannot possibly become grabs him by the arm, pulling him in for just a moment to show the truth of his claim, mind-to-mind.

“I barely remember being you,” he admits, letting Merlin go. “And you won’t believe me for years.” He sighs, pulling that unfathomable power back in, until the air is barely tinged with magic. “We are truly limitless, and to waste it all by waiting…” He shrugs, smiling slightly. “You’ll understand one day, as I did.”

“You’re mad,” Merlin says trying not to panic, knowing the words a lie.

“Perhaps.” The older Merlin rises to his feet and Merlin jerks away, backing up until he hits the door. “I’ve had two thousand years of people who live and die in less than a century, who rarely change even as the times do. Two thousand years on the planet of my birth and dozens of others, of magic that grows, of technology that seems to be magic itself, of living suns and dying worlds, of so many beings—”

He stops suddenly, eyes locked on Merlin’s. “You are very young, Emrys,” he says gently. “There is so much you’ve yet to comprehend, to even consider possible.” He sighs deeply. “You still think you exist only to serve Arthur, that you failed.”

“There was no Golden Age,” Merlin hisses, clinging to that in order to ground himself because absolutely nothing makes sense.

While the older Merlin rubs at his face, Merlin gasps as he realizes something, and steps forward to shout, “You’re from the future! You learn to travel in time?”

In the months after Camlann, he’d tried. He’d exhausted himself trying to stop the battle, to save Morgana from her madness, to even go back and kill Uther at the start of the Great Purge. But though he tore holes in the world (that he’d then had to repair), he could never go back even a minute.

“No,” the older Merlin says quietly, solemnly. “Not how you mean. Not how you want.”

Merlin has not lost control in decades, but in this moment, staring at what he’ll one day be, his magic begins to build, focused on this man he can’t possibly become—

This man who waves his hand to dissipate the storm.

“Emrys,” he says tiredly. “Some things must happen because they are woven into the fabric of reality. They are fixed points in time, around which all else pivots. Camelot will always fall. So too will Arthur Pendragon.”

“No!” Merlin cries, fists clenched, magic buffeting out again.

“He will never grow old, settled into a Golden Age,” the _liar_ says. “He will die in battle, will sail into the mists. You cannot change it.”

Merlin’s skin burns as his rage peaks—and again, his magic is batted aside as though it’s nothing.

“I, Emrys, could not change it. When you say these words to the boy you once were, you will not have been able to change it.” The words ring out and Merlin closes his eyes because he hears the truth in them.

“Then why do we exist?” he asks, sinking down to his knees, arms wrapped around himself. “If we’re not going to guide and protect him?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” a new voice says and Merlin looks up to see the other stranger, dressed oddly and seemingly barely older than Merlin. “I’ve known you a long time,” the man says, “and here’s the first time you ever meet me.”

Merlin glares at him. “You’re from the future, too?” he grits out, angrier than he’s been since Arthur’s death, brimming with so much rage he trembles.

“In a roundabout sort of way, yes,” the man says cheerfully. “I’m the Doctor.”

“We should leave now,” the older Merlin says. “He won’t hear anything else.” He sighs softly and steps past the Doctor to kneel in front of Merlin, who is shaking with how strongly he’s clutching his magic. He reaches out to grip Merlin’s chin, so that Merlin can’t turn away. “I was you, child,” he murmurs, “so long ago I can barely remember. I know your hate, your rage, the depths of despair you can sink to, the longing you feel to scorch the Earth.”

“Fuck you,” Merlin snarls, feeling the burn as his magic tries again to lash out. 

The man he _will not_ become laughs softly, fingers tightening, pressing into Merlin’s skin. He leans forward, not allowing Merlin to flinch, and kisses his forehead. “You have so much potential, Emrys. Do not waste it pining for him.” he sighs again, settling back onto his knees, golden eyes gazing into Merlin’s. “Arthur will come back or he won’t, and your sitting beside a dry lakebed will have no effect on it.”

He squeezes Merlin’s chin once more and rises. “Come, Doctor,” he says, spinning sharply on his heel.

There is something sad in the Doctor’s eyes as he nods and waves to Merlin. Merlin looks past him to the man he won’t become, who waves his hand to uncloak a large blue box with strange writing on it that rearranges itself with no effort from Merlin.

“I do miss being you,” the man says, hand on what seems to be a door. “It aches, the hole where I used to be certain. I sometimes think I lost your fire.”

“I will never become you,” Merlin vows.

He laughs, glancing back. “I swore that, too.”

.

He stays curled up beside the door until long after sunset, gazing sightlessly at where the blue box had been.

Merlin wants to pretend none of it happened, but he can still feel the imprint of fingers on his chin. He breathes and he breathes and he breathes, and that night, he packs up anything he doesn’t want to lose (which is only the books from Gaius and a pendant once worn by a queen), and he leaves.

He can’t stand remembering anything that man he’ll never be said, so sure, so cold, so he locks it all away and he wanders, circling back to the lake that swallowed Arthur every few years. He wanders, stopping to help travelers sometimes, living in villages and towns for a few years before moving on. He wanders, and he waits.

He doesn’t age. His magic grows. Sometimes, he’s so angry the air around him shudders, and sometimes he’s so sad he doesn’t move for days. But he always comes out of it and continues on, because Arthur will return one day, when the world needs him again, and Arthur will need Merlin.

Decades become centuries.

When he’s in New York in the 1930s, arguing with himself about whether or not to get involved in the second horrible war in twenty years, he sees an odd blue box on the street and a lock in his mind shatters.

.

Time travel is a tricky business.

Merlin steps out of the Tardis, on his third journey with the Doctor, into a little room in a little town, and he sighs.

“You could go by Jethro,” the Doctor is saying. “I met a Jethro once, he looked a lot like you.” He narrows his eyes at Merlin. “Oh, you are clever, aren’t you?”

Merlin smiles, the barest twist of his lips. 

“So, you talked the Tardis into coming here,” the Doctor says. He claps his hands, swinging around to face Merlin. “Why?”

“Because I need to have a talk with myself,” Merlin says. “And,” he adds offhandedly, “there’s a monster eating people.”

He’d been so young. So sure. It took a thousand years before he finally realized there was no point in waiting, and now he’s got to tell the boy what he himself hadn’t believed. 

But he’s already heard the words, which means he has to say them. “Don’t you ever get confused?” he asks, waving his hand to shield the Tardis and then shifting himself and the Doctor to a clearing where two tacked up horses wait. 

“I really do hate it when you do that,” the Doctor says, patting his mare on the nose. “And yes, of course I do, but that’s half the fun.”

Merlin reaches out to briefly touch the boy’s mind. He’s so small, so young. Not even a century and a half of life, and already tired. Waiting a for a king to return and give him purpose.

He pulls back from the boy and closes his eyes as he stretches his presence as far as he can, into the Earth and out into the sky. For just a moment, he breathes on nine worlds and in the heart of a star.

Will he be able to give all of this up, should Arthur be born again?

“Jethro!” the Doctor calls and he fall back into himself.

“That isn’t my name,” he informs the Doctor, mounting the horse and lightly tapping his sides.

The Doctor laughs before prattling on about contradictions and fallacies. Merlin listens with part of his attention, but the rest is focused on the woods, the countryside, the air. The boy who won’t realize what he’s sensing for another week.

He misses being that boy.

And when the boy is shouting at him, tears in his eyes, lit up with fire he doesn’t feel anymore, he thinks, _Oh, I wish you wouldn’t become me._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title: (the folly of) youth   
> Fandom: Merlin (BBC)/Doctor Who  
> Disclaimer: Merlin, Arthur, Jethro, Jethro’s parents, and the Doctor aren’t mine   
> Warnings: post-series for Merlin; during season 3 and 4 for Doctor Who; time travel shenanigans   
> Pairings: none  
> Rating: PG  
> Wordcount: 1730  
> Point of view: third

He first feels a glimmer of something while he’s arguing with his parents about his wish to travel on his own. It’s like a buzz he can barely hear, always there. He doesn’t realize what it is for months as he fights with his parents, slams the antiquated doors his mother has, finally sits down with them to plan out a trip he won’t hate.

(He’ll still pretend to hate it, of course, but all three of them will know the truth.)

The buzz strengthens. It’s not until his mother is watching a vid on ancient legends that he stops, eyes on the hologram, and think, _Oh_.

Arthur is soon to return. 

Part of him wants to drop Jethro, to travel to the origin of the sensation. Part of him wants to disappear, pretend he never felt it.

But his parents would hurt, if he did that. So he goes to bed and _reaches_ , straining to touch the spark that once was his reason for existence.

Arthur is still so bright, even yet unborn, sleeping in his mother’s warmth. On Earth, of course. He is unsurprised.

He realizes, as he keeps returning to that spark, barely in his reach, that Arthur will be born in his own past. Every Merlin is feeling him, is reaching for him. Every Merlin after that point in time—he shies away from that thought and throws himself into a strop purely to feel like the angry teenager he hasn’t been in centuries. 

Arthur is born as Jethro and his parents settle into their hotel on Midnight. 

He pretends to not recognize the Doctor. He allows events to play out, keeping his mental shields at full force and protecting his parents, which means that the shadow latches onto first the doomed Sky and then the Doctor. He feels so remote, so distanced from everything because he must: his king has been born and he cannot go. He has already told the boy he was that waiting is pointless, and so he has believed for half a millennium. He had a life to live, galaxies to explore—Arthur is a dream from a life he could barely remember.

And yet, the spark keeps calling to him from a far-off planet circling a star most of the multiverse could not even name. 

After they escape the shuttle, his parents crawl into bed and he pretends he can’t hear them crying. He stares at the ceiling and then reaches through space and time to cling to the newborn king. 

He still does not leave. It had been so easy, when Arthr was still a ghost. But now he is real—he is a sobbing infant in someone’s arms. How simple it had seemed, when he stood in front of that child he once was.

“Jethro,” his mother says in the morning, reaching up to mess with his hair. “How are you, sweetie?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” he says softly and hugs her.

She doesn’t remember that the son she carried died. His father doesn’t remember the year they spent grieving after the accident. He’d wanted to belong somewhere and they wanted a child so badly—they were on the cusp of making a terrible decision when he rewrote their personal history. He will stay with them until they die.

“Oh, sweetheart,” his mother weeps, face buried in his chest. 

“It’ll be fine, Mom,” he murmurs. 

His father walks over to wrap his arms around them both. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says.

The vacation is cut short and Jethro doesn’t raise any sort of fuss at all. His parents are very quiet for the following months, but they slowly come out of it. He falls back into his studies, trying to focus like he did before he felt Arthur’s return. 

Every so often, he realizes he’s touching the spark, for comfort, as an anchor. (He does not wonder why his younger self never went to their king. He does not wonder why he doesn’t remember this happening.)

He is in the middle of a testing module when the spark is snuffed out. He gasps, concentration shattered, and he reaches with everything he is, grasping desperately for—

An absence in space. A hole where something has been rent, torn. 

He comes to on the floor and his fellow students surrounding him in a panic.

“I’m fine,” he grits out, still gasping for breath he’ll never catch because Arthur is _gone_. Gone _where_? how? Who has the power to unmake a soul?

His mom comes for him, insists she take him home. She tucks him into bed, has some soup made, and leaves him after asking, “Are you alright, sweetie?” and he ignores her.

He feels empty. Arthur had been a concept for so long, and then for nearly a year he was present again, a bright warmth who could become Merlin’s king again. He almost senses all the other Merlins reeling and reaching, so he sinks into his magic as he hasn’t for so long—

And he finds the Doctor, and the imprint of another Time Lord, of a hole in reality where time has been rewritten. It should be impossible—he has met very few individuals or entities who possess more power than him, and none of them could affect the threads of time. To find that it has been done, and the cost is…

Not just Arthur. Thousands of souls that were and now aren’t, who had been born and then not killed but _erased—_

Merlin breathes slowly in Jethro’s bed. He exhales and inhales and exhales, fists clenched, his magic roiling in his blood as it hasn’t since he lived on Earth. 

Why doesn’t he remember this happening, if every Merlin felt his birth? Why did no Merlin go to him? Will he forget? He turns from the depths of space and the hole in existence inward to explore his magic, his mind, his soul. What he finds after—how long has he been lost, searching?

But he finds a locked chest, the kind they used in Camelot. A single touch to the padlock opens it, the slightest lick of magic. And inside it…

He awakens in his mother’s arms, his father kneeling on the floor before them. “Jethro, baby, it’s alright, sweetie, I promise,” Mom is saying, obviously trying not to panic. There are tears on his face. His body aches like he’s been sobbing for hours.

“Jethro?” his mother says. 

He blinks at her. He breathes. 

He is very angry. He’s—desolate. It’s settling in, hundreds of Merlin’s grief and rage. He himself had locked it away because—

Because—

Oh, but he’d lied to the child and hadn’t even known it for a lie. And the Doctor, his _friend_ , the heroic meddler he’d traveled with…

Merlin has not grieved yet. So he clings to his mother and he cries, he sobs with his face in her belly, and he falls into an exhausted slumber. 

If the king is reborn into a child who does not exist—will he be reborn again? Merlin awakens wondering for just a moment before rage engulfs him, the grief washed away by an anger so vast and wide he knows he’s never felt it before in all his centuries. 

“Jethro?” his father asks.

Merlin sits up in his bed. “I’m fine,” he says calmly. “Sorry I worried you.”

To live, every Merlin had locked away his grief and his rage. He breathes, smiling up at his father. He breathes.

“Son?” his father asks. 

All he has is time. So he will step back into Jethro’s life, to stay until his parents die. And then—

Arthur was born and erased half a millennium ago. He has yet to be reborn. Two thousand years between his first and his second—how long until his third? Will there even _be_ a third?

“Jethro, baby?” his mother asks, reaching out to touch his face. 

“I’m tired,” he says. 

His mother kisses his cheek and hugs him; his father squeezes him tight. And then they leave him to sleep. The next morning, they drag him to a doctor. 

But of course, physically nothing is wrong. He returns to school, completes his exams, and moves on with his studies. His focus shifts for the next module, from robotic maintenance to legends. His parents and friends don’t understand but Merlin spends five years exploring ancient Earth myths of a legendary figure known as the Once and Future King. He isn’t happy, though he pretends to be for his parents.

He has time to kill until his parents pass on and he’s spent nearly two thousand years forgetting his king.

If he’d gone to Earth when Arthur was reborn, that younger him—

He breathes. Spreads himself through the stars and exhales across the cosmos. The Doctor is out there, prancing around and making a mess. Once Merlin had been like that, saving the day without care of collateral damage. He did it all for Arthur, sure of the valor of his cause. All for Arthur, for his king. 

Because of the Doctor, his _friend_ , his king has been undone and may never be reborn.

He breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Completes his studies, becomes a scholar, takes care of his parents as they grow old, gives them back to the stars after they pass, three breaths apart.

Once they are gone, he drops Jethro, straightens his spine, and his eyes flare gold, letting him gaze throughout space, seeking the Doctor.

If he can determine what the Doctor did, perhaps he can undo it.

He breathes out slowly, the gold leeching from his eyes. He had told the child to not lose himself in waiting. As he said the words, he meant them. But then he felt the rebirth of his king. Two thousand and a half years after he died, Arthur returned. Merlin felt his glow across time. He had forgotten—so much.

He’d forgotten _everything_. 

He sells Jethro’s parents’ apartment, leaves all of Jethro’s belongings behind, and books passage on the first shuttle off-world. There is still rage thrumming in his blood, still grief bubbling in his throat. He watches the stars pass by and thinks back—millennia since Arthur’s death and it seems only yesterday. 

Oh, but what a falsehood he’d told the boy he once was.

He knows where the Doctor will be.


End file.
